Trump administration shuts down 270 trucking schools over illegal immigrant licensing failures

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered 270 commercial driver's licensing schools closed for graduating truck drivers who cannot speak English, a crackdown officials say follows 239 deaths on American roads.

Duffy made the announcement Monday at a press conference in Detroit, flanked by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and other federal officials. The Department of Transportation pulled 110 schools from the federal Training Provider Registry and ordered them to stop all operations immediately. Another 160 schools were suspended for failing to meet basic training facility standards.

The 110 shuttered schools share a common thread: each one graduated at least 10 drivers who were later cited during roadside inspections for failing to meet the longstanding federal requirement that commercial vehicle operators speak English. Altogether, those schools produced roughly 5,000 drivers who could not meet the standard, the New York Post reported.

Duffy pins the problem on Biden-era self-certification

Duffy placed the blame squarely on a prior administration policy that let trucking schools certify themselves as meeting federal standards, with no outside verification.

"The last administration allowed truck driving schools to self-certify to say that they meet all of the federal standards to be a certified truck driving school," Duffy said. "What we found is many of those schools don't actually meet that standard."

The federal English proficiency rule is not new. Duffy stressed that point repeatedly.

"You have to speak English to operate a commercial vehicle. I didn't create that rule. President Trump didn't create that rule. That rule has been in place for decades, and we have schools that know the rule and still pass people through their school who can't speak the language."

The Department of Transportation oversees roughly 31,000 CDL training schools across the country. The 270 targeted in this action represent less than one percent of that total, but officials described them as the worst offenders in a system that had been left to police itself. Nationwide, nearly 30,000 drivers have been placed out of service for English-language violations, a figure that reveals how far the problem extends beyond the schools themselves.

Named schools linked to fatal crashes in Oklahoma and Texas

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek Barrs named two schools and tied them directly to deaths on the road. Platinum Plus Truck Driving School in California certified 36 drivers who were later cited for English proficiency violations. One of those trainees killed someone in Oklahoma.

ASC Technical Institute in Texas certified 58 drivers who were similarly cited. One of its trainees ran a stop sign and killed a local man in a Texas county.

"Every single one of these schools passed at least 10 drivers who were subsequently cited for English language proficiency during roadside inspections by law enforcement," Barrs said.

The human cost was on display at the Detroit press conference. Five-year-old Delilah Coleman attended the event. In 2024, she suffered a brain injury after a pileup in California caused by Partap Singh, an illegal immigrant driving an 18-wheeler. The administration has made cases like hers central to its argument that lax oversight costs lives, a pattern that extends well beyond trucking. An illegal immigrant in Des Moines recently received a suspended sentence in a fatal hit-and-run before facing deportation.

Mullin targets sanctuary cities, California, and corrupt DMV workers

Homeland Security Secretary Mullin, a former Oklahoma congressman and senator who said he earned his own CDL at age 21, described a licensing system riddled with fraud. He recalled his own experience: walking around the truck, identifying components, bleeding the air brakes, and completing a long road test. The schools being shut down, he argued, were producing drivers who never cleared those basic hurdles.

Mullin pointed to California under Governor Gavin Newsom as the worst offender. "By far, the worst abusers are in California under Gavin Newsom's leadership," he said. "It doesn't just affect California. It affects our entire country." He added that "almost every one" of the illegal immigrant drivers involved in deadly and near-fatal incidents had been "given their CDLs in sanctuary cities."

DHS ran a three-day operation in late July that resulted in more than 800 truckers being busted for unsafe driving. Thirty-six of them could not speak English. Mullin described one detail that captures the absurdity of the breakdown: 107 trucks were pulled off the road because the drivers' CDLs literally read "No Name Given."

"These individuals are dangerous, and because of the failure from the previous administration, from the Biden administration, they killed hundreds of people and unfortunately injured thousands."

Mullin went further, describing an investigative pipeline that stretches beyond the schools. DHS is now targeting DMV employees suspected of accepting payments, sometimes from cartels, to help illegal immigrants bypass licensing requirements. Investigators have also uncovered visa fraud, labor law violations, financial crimes, and drug trafficking tied to CDL businesses.

The broader crackdown has already produced substantial numbers. The Trump administration has removed over 24,000 drivers from roads for failing English requirements and canceled more than 28,000 licenses illegally issued to foreign drivers. DHS and the Department of Transportation are jointly investigating approximately 75 additional entry-level schools suspected of fraudulent certification.

A wider sweep already under way: 550 schools and 1,400 sting operations

Monday's announcement appears to be one piece of a broader enforcement campaign. The Department of Transportation has conducted 1,400 sting operations across all 50 states, deploying 300 investigators who found schools operating from fake addresses with unqualified instructors and improper training vehicles. More than 550 schools have been shuttered in total, with 109 training providers voluntarily pulling themselves from the registry once they learned inspections were coming, a telling sign of how many operators knew they could not withstand scrutiny.

Another 97 providers remain under investigation. The Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents independent truckers, praised the action. Its president, Todd Spencer, said the industry had been allowed to operate "like the Wild, Wild West, where anything goes and nobody asks any questions."

Spencer also addressed the root cause from the industry's perspective. "Rather than fix retention problems and working conditions, some in the industry chose to cut corners and push undertrained drivers onto the road," he told the AP. "That approach has undermined safety and devalued the entire trucking profession."

Andrew Ferguson, vice chairman of the anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance, struck a harder tone at the Detroit press conference. "If a school is giving out a CDL fraudulently, you need men with guns and prosecutors to find them, put them in jail, and make sure that they rot in jail," he said.

The enforcement push fits within a broader pattern of the Trump administration using executive authority to tighten immigration-related enforcement across multiple agencies. The Supreme Court recently handed the administration two major immigration victories in a single day, reinforcing the legal foundation for actions like this one. At the same time, the administration has faced resistance from Biden-appointed judges pushing back on other immigration measures.

239 deaths and a system that looked the other way

Duffy said 239 people have died in crashes caused by non-English-speaking truck drivers since Trump took office in January 2025. That figure, paired with Mullin's claim that "thousands" have been injured, frames the enforcement action not as regulatory housekeeping but as a public safety emergency created by years of neglect.

Critics will ask whether pulling 270 schools offline disrupts the supply of new commercial drivers at a time when the trucking industry already struggles with shortages. Duffy dismissed that concern. "We're not gonna have a problem," he said. "We're gonna have truck drivers."

The math supports his confidence, at least on paper. With roughly 31,000 CDL schools still operating, the shutdown removes fewer than one in a hundred. The question is whether the remaining schools, and the states that issue the actual licenses, will take the signal seriously enough to clean up their own operations before federal investigators arrive.

The consequences of illegal immigration extend far beyond the roads. A Federal Reserve paper recently linked the Biden-era immigration surge to sharp increases in home prices and rents, another cost borne by Americans who had no say in the policy failures that produced it.

A five-year-old girl with a brain injury stood at a podium in Detroit on Monday because the system that was supposed to keep dangerous drivers off the road chose to look the other way. The schools are closed now. The harder question is why it took this long.